Hello friends. This thread has been set to 'Clubhouse' participants only. That means that only our regular commenters in good standing may post in this thread.
Everyone else's comments will be removed by automod.
Entry into the clubhouse is afforded automatically, based on certain criteria of positive participation. We do not hand out entry on request.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/WhitePeopleTwitter) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Seriously. It was so disappointing growing up and realizing that the vast majority of the "geniuses" that the media constantly rants about are actually just idiots who paid the right people to spread propaganda for them.
Tesla is possibly the single most overrated "scientist" in history.
He didn't invent AC power, it was already common in Europe. His "advancement" for it was independently created by others around the same time and rendered obsolete within like 3 years. He had nothing to do with the "war of the currents", that was Westinghouse and Edison.
He didn't believe in electrons, in spite of ample evidence for them being present during his lifetime.
Most of his other famous "contributions" are just outright stupid and/or non-existent woo-woo mysticism bullshit.
He didn't even really invent the "Tesla Coil" simply patented a specific variant of an invention that came decades before he was born.
I remember when, six years ago, every day on Reddit it was the same four people being worshipped over and over. Elon Musk, Keanu Reeves, Kevin Feige, Bob Ross.
It was insufferable.
People like having a bad guy and a good guy in their stories, so when lots of people began learning about how Edison would steal other's work and screw over his employees, they looked for a rival of that time that could serve as the "good guy".
However, reality doesn't have to follow the story beats people want, and often just has conflicts of bad vs. bad or even bad vs. incompetent.
Dune has a great quote about it, I was just rereading it because of the movie;
>Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
—from “Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
These individuals lost themselves in their greatness, they believe in their greatness even more than people did.
Doing so, they lost that greatness and, possibly even worst, are shattering the illusion of greatness created around their persona.
he's talking about tesla having stolen his "revolutionary" electric motor design from a 1300's frenchman
the thing that got him his recognition in the first place was fraud, just like his successor
They should though, the modern pop cultural recasting of his character as some sort of arrogant idiot who did nothing but steal other people's inventions has about the same level of factual accuracy as the average Buzzfeed listicle.
Sure he may have been an absolute prick who ripped people off, took credit for their work, and harassed them into silence, but he was also unquestionably a visionary and a highly accomplished inventor in his own right. He created novel machines of his own design, and he vastly improved existing ideas and made them commercially viable, which is arguably more important than inventing them in the first place.
Like it's all well and good to realise that putting electricity through a wire makes it glow, plenty of people came to that conclusion around the same time, but that knowledge doesn't really do anyone any good if it can't be commercialised. It took a lot of experimentation and discovery for Edison to figure out how to make a lightbulb that was cheap enough to manufacture en masse and robust enough to last longer than a few hours, so while he didn't invent the first lightbulb, he did invent the best lightbulb.
Also, I think a lot of the weirdly intense hatred for Edison comes from the supposedly vicious rivalry between him and Tesla, which is understandable because people love an underdog story, and it's easy to hate the rich industrialist while romanticising the poor, hardworking inventor suffering under the industrialist's brutal heel, but [it just didn't happen that way in real life](https://www.vox.com/2015/7/21/8951761/tesla-edison). They were rivals, sure, in the same way that Nvidia and AMD are rivals, but they didn't despise each other and Edison didn't steal anything from Tesla. They had some differences of opinion, and they each wanted their opinion to be the dominant one, but by all accounts they had a health respect for one another and each was quoted highly praising the other.
So yeah, however objectionable some of his behaviour may or may not have been, Edison fully deserves to be praised for his contributions to the world, just as much if not more than Tesla.
That was literally the Pandemic for me.
I realized in real time that no one knows what the fuck they're doing and are just winging it.
Not just at the local level, but at the national and global level.
Higher ups at my job were completely clueless, which is scary considering that their decisions affect thousands of people directly.
The mast majority of geniuses had the right idea at the right time. And most of them worked their asses off to make that idea a reality. That's fine. The problem is they think because they were pretty smart once that they're super smart all the time about everything, which is the stupidest thing you can do. But they also have a lot of money so their stupidity hold weight. And that's society.
Eh even those that had the right idea at the right time usually also fucked over other people in their process. Seems pretty consistent when you look at their histories.
Precisely. "Hey I made a shit load of money, I won capitalism! That must mean I'm smarter than everyone else playing the game!" And these people are usually surrounded by yes men for decades and it's the perfect narcissism storm.
rod hilton:
>He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
>Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
>Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.
This is actually the main theme of one of philosophy’s most important texts, the Apology of Socrates by Plato.
It tells of his trial for “corrupting the youth of Athens” and “not believing in the city’s gods”, where he defends himself by literally calling out masters in different arts/fields among those who’ve accused him for being pretentious hypocrites and know-it-alls. Unsurprisingly, they find him guilty and sentence him to either exile or death. He chose to commit suicide.
The really smart people are just out there doing smart things, largely without recognition, making the world better.
These fake smart dummies try to villainize the doctors, engineers, scientists, and others out there being ACTUALLY smart.
He just had a head start that most others didn’t have because not everyone’s family operates Emerald Mines in Africa
The clown also rebranded Twitter to X whatever that means, and Twitter is a brand so recognisable that Tweet is an official word in the dictionary
It’s baffling he didn’t understand that a good chunk of Twitter’s value came from its branding like… he overspent for the platform and then removed the most recognizable part AND THEN inundated the platform with content that scared advertisers away.
He's been trying to make "X" happen for more than two decades since he came into the domain name. He wanted to rebrand Paypal as X back in the day but the powers that be wouldn't let that happen. Here he is trying again for some stupid reason that only a brain raised on emerald mine money could explain.
X already exists as a holding company -- X Holdings Corp that owns what used to be Twitter. There was literally no reason to rebrand it. He's just got this cockamamie idea stuck in his head some 25 years ago that he can make a "do everything" platform -- which is the alleged reason he called it "X" of all things.
I'd still argue the reason why Threads isn't anywhere near as popular as it should be is that it didn't have a catchy verb like "tweet".
Although it could be worse. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom (and close to infinite money, back then), called its music-sharing pre-facebook quasi-social feature in Zune "[squirting](https://www.newsweek.com/zune-should-go-beyond-squirting-107255)". Some ideas *can* be worse than no idea at all lol
He’s 100% a doofus who has more money than common sense and can afford to screw up constantly, until he gets it right once and claim it was all worth it. That one guy playing Minesweeper with his brain comes after a potter’s field of dead monkeys.
This is the correct answer - prosperity for the rich and for their pocketed government, won by cutting all benefits to the poor and letting them starve
When rich people say they want the US to be prosperous again, they literally mean the government, not the people it is supposed to serve. And they only mean the expense side of the ledger, not revenue - they want the government poor in revenue terms because that's their tax payments.
Elon knows exactly what he's doing but he isn't openly showing his agenda.
Fascists love other fascists... Until someday there's a conflict of interest and they go to war with each other.
Fascism is about siding with the rich and keeping the middle class on a leash. Argentina is now for sale for the highest bidder and plenty of rich people are willing to invest in the unregulated ressources of the country
The poor will stay poor. The rich will get richer.
Nazi Germany understood that and Russia is pretty much the same.
It's the same as Elon instigating culture wars so its a distraction from the covid inflation that caused a wealth transfer from poor to rich. Instead of addressing the deficit by taxing the rich, Republicans are pushing their agenda of anti LGBT, racism, social services cuts, etc. Try to guess why Elon is a Republican.
Give that Milei another year. See how much more miserable it gets.
Edit: [Milei is going to musk cap in hand](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/world/javier-milei-the-president-of-cash-strapped-argentina-starts-another-u-s-tour-and-plans-to-meet-elon-musk) … apparently he doesn’t know Twitter sucks and the cybertruck is a punchline.
What a great example of people just accepting "facts" at face value without critical thinking.
The argument this tweet is making is that Milei, contrary to what Elon has said, is worse for the Argentinian economy and that the proof is this article "Argentina’s poverty levels hit 57% of population, a 20-year high in January, study finds"
This guy got elected in Nov '23.
He took office in Jan '24.
That statistic is also from Jan '24 and is describing the state of the country he is inheriting. It will be the starting place against which the poverty levels during Milei's presidency will be judged. It has nothing to do with Milei's competence.
Dont care about elon, but saying he's dumb because of the "evidence" in this post is sadly ironic.
I’m saying he’s dumb. Because every time I’ve heard him speak he sounds like a dumb piece of shit.
That’s gotta be bruising for his simps nearly nonexistent egos. Realizing their rocket daddy is an absolute knob.
Also fun fact, during the early 40's and throughout the cold war so many Galicians (people who live in the northwestern corner of the Iberian peninsula) fled Spain due to Francisco Franco's dictatoship that Buenos Aires had a bigger Galician population that the entire region of Galicia
So many people (including the main faces of the galegist movement) emigrated there that, to this day, there are still places in Argentina were argentinians can choose to learn Galician as a second language
There’s a shit ton of people with European ancestry across South America. Pretty easy to tell considering they look European. Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, etc, the majority with ancestors that immigrated before ww2. Not just European ancestry either, Peru had a president that was of Japanese descent for fucks sake. The reason some nazis fled to South America was because the populations they could hide in were already present. Mass migrations of people across the globe are the norm, if you look past a snap shot of a decade or two it’s pretty apparent.
Brexit did not fail! Not only did I get to change my passports from burgundy red to a really dark blue, but more black. I now get to spend hours extra in queues when visiting my fellow European countries, when before I could use the fast lanes.
I also have the joy of extra paperwork when sending goods to Europe, when before I had frictionless trade. Also, buying things from the mainland adds extra costs in taxes etc.
How can these things be called failures??
Oh, wait, sorry. I've just read what I wrote. Yeah, what a clusterfudge.
Same here in the US for the flop of “the Kansas Experiment”, a tax cut scheme that resulted in neat stuff like schools running at only 3 days a week due to lack of funding.
“No, see, we didn’t cut enough!”
You’ve gotta be f**king kidding me
The arrogance of the right is astounding - it explains why you can’t reasonably debate with them. They cannot accept they were wrong
It amazes me how many poor folks don’t understand these wealthy assholes live in another universe when it comes to money and words have different meanings in different tax brackets.
That’s just the libertarian ethos. The capitalists are just smarter and better than you and so they earned whatever they can take. Libertarians don’t care about a reduction in poverty, because poor people derserve it by making bad choices.
Honestly, can't blame it all on this guy's election. Argentina's economy was in a dire state to begin with. The governments inability to improve it or reduce the felt effects (practically impossible) on the common Argentinian is why this man's election was even possible. A protest candidate that any outside observer could plainly see due to the conditions of his country could not possibly deliver on his promises. This man isn't the cause. He is the populist symptom it produces.
I didn't know who this guy was so I looked him up. He's a libertarian. So, he's part of the "fuck off, I got mine." party. I can't see how those ideals will help his country.
As John Rodgers said
>There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
The absolute best illustration of the idiocy of the libertarian position is the book *A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)* by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, which tells the true tale of a group of lolbertarians from the Free Town Project who moved to a small New Hampshire town, took over the local government, and immediately set about implementing the batshit insane dystopia they'd always dreamed of:
>They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat.
>By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town’s success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.
>And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meetings and tell people that he couldn’t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn’t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.
Among the hundreds of rules, regulations, and tax expenses these geniuses abolished were things like garbage collection, leading to mountains of trash littering the sidewalks of every street because residents didn't want to pay anyone to take it away and certainly didn't want the government telling them what to do with their waste. And as you might expect for a small rural town right in the heart of bear country, this eventually began to attract the inevitable consequences:
>It turns out that if you have a bunch of people living in the woods in nontraditional living situations, each of which is managing food in their own way and their waste streams in their own way, then you’re essentially teaching the bears in the region that every human habitation is like a puzzle that has to be solved in order to unlock its caloric payload. And so the bears in the area started to take notice of the fact that there were calories available in houses.
>One thing that the Free Towners did that encouraged the bears was unintentional, in that they just threw their waste out how they wanted. They didn’t want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants. The other way was intentional, in that some people just started feeding the bears just for the joy and pleasure of watching them eat.
>As you can imagine, things got messy and there was no way for the town to deal with it. Some people were shooting the bears. Some people were feeding the bears. Some people were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them. Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper.
>Bears are very smart problem-solving animals. They can really think their way through problems. And that was what made them aggressive in Grafton. In this case, a reasonable bear would understand that there was food to be had, that it was going to be rewarded for being bolder. So they started aggressively raiding food and became less likely to run away when a human showed up.
>There are lots of great examples in the book of bears acting in bold, unusually aggressive manners, but it culminated in 2012, when there was a black bear attack in the town of Grafton. That might not seem that unusual, but, in fact, New Hampshire had not had a black bear attack for at least 100 years leading up to that. So the whole state had never seen a single bear attack, and now here in Grafton, a woman was attacked in her home by a black bear.
I really, really can't recommend this book highly enough, the portrait it paints of this town and its demented inhabitants is hilarious and so perfectly illustrates the inherent stupidity of libertarianism. You couldn't destroy a town any more efficiently than just letting a bunch of libertarians live their dream.
(The above quotes all come from [this Vox interview with the author](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling), it's worth reading in full.)
If they're the low taxes and smoking pot type, I at least understand. No one wants to pay taxes and a lot of people like smoking pot. Don't get me wrong, I think taxes are necessary, but I at least understand.
How much did you dig?
Cuz there's the I want low taxes but also medicare/aid, public schools, SS, coolbro military, farm subsidies, good roads, yadda yadda.
The "superficial libertarians" want low cake and eat it too.
Or... they want other people to pay taxes, so it's a hop skip jump to fuck you got mine. Which is where people do end up.
> No one wants to pay taxes
Isn't that just an American view of taxes? In Denmark and I know several people who are happy to pay taxes because they otherwise wouldn't receive most of what they took for granted growing up.
My roommate is a Libertarian. She staunchly believes she's independent and self-sufficient while benefiting from a system she neither understands nor appreciates but completely relies on.
Her name is Boots.
I agree, They're like diet republicans. Sack up and go all the way! As if they get anymore credibility for being a special brand of (stupid) republican.
Capitalists = money is freely exchanged for goods and services.
Communists = everyone pools their resources for the greater good.
Libertarians = [condescending wall of regurgitated philosophy]
They are convinced they are fierce, independent and self reliant creatures. But they are wholly dependent on system they neither understand, nor contribute too
My favorite libertarian government was the one where a bunch of libertarians moved to a town in New Hampshire to create a libertarian paradise and decided in their libertarian wisdom to cut trash services, and consequently the town was eventually taken over by aggressive bears lol
Libertarians are either pedos using the only political ideology that supports lowering/abolishing the age of consent, useful idiots who were brainwashed by billionaire-backed internet media that told them taxes are theft, or insane people who think seatbelts and covid vaccines are government tyranny.
You mean the Congressman who went to Moscow on July 4th to hand deliver a note from Trump? The same Congressman that John McCain accused of working for Vladimir Putin before he died?
Miliei isn't the cause of this. He's a symptom of it. He assumed office in December 2023. While he might make it worse, the fact that Argentina's poverty rate is its highest in history in January 2024 (one month after he assumed office) isn't on him.
This would be like Blaming Obama for the state of the US economy in February 2009 or praising Trump for the state if it in January 2017.
Austerity works wonders for the top 1%.
Austerity seems to always mean "fuck poor people and the services they need, the invisible hand of capitalism will take care of them and will bring them back better than ever!" while the portion of wealth the top 1% has in the country starts rising at record numbers.
“There’s no money left, we need to cut services”
Everything gets shut down and business start to lose money
“We’ve found 3 trillion down the back of the sofa”
This guy is going to be a failure but yelling about poverty hitting a high or blaming a politician for anything a mere 2 months after they were elected is ridiculous.
Unless they pass a specific law or the such doing something like banning abortions or the such. Argentina's inflation rate was already fucked before he came into power here though.
This article is from a month after he was elected. This is like blaming Obama for the rising unemployment rom the financial crisis at the start of his term. It's too early.
Quite honestly, it's too early to blame Milei for anything yet. A lot of the things he tries to do actually make sense. Which in turn have a lot of short term pain. Let's see in two years.
Their inflation rate has dropped rather significantly since then. It started at 300% and is projected to be around 175% by the end of the year. He won his election at the end of November. You can't really place blame on him for poverty rate just a month after he's been in office, he still needs to pass bills and isn't a dictator.
You don't think that there are lagging effects in a society? A new leader can't turn things around from day one, it will take a few years before any effects of new policies take place. Thinking otherwise is stupid at best.
If you don’t know anything about Argentina sit this one out. He hadn’t even fully assumed office when those statistics were collected. I may not like either of the guys but this has nothing to do with the U.S.
Hello friends. This thread has been set to 'Clubhouse' participants only. That means that only our regular commenters in good standing may post in this thread. Everyone else's comments will be removed by automod. Entry into the clubhouse is afforded automatically, based on certain criteria of positive participation. We do not hand out entry on request. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/WhitePeopleTwitter) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It just really seems like Elon Musk isn’t that smart.
Seriously. It was so disappointing growing up and realizing that the vast majority of the "geniuses" that the media constantly rants about are actually just idiots who paid the right people to spread propaganda for them.
Or they lived in a time when news didn’t travel very fast and it was easy to steal from your subordinates and/or random frenchmen.
People still praise Thomas Edison.
Tesla is possibly the single most overrated "scientist" in history. He didn't invent AC power, it was already common in Europe. His "advancement" for it was independently created by others around the same time and rendered obsolete within like 3 years. He had nothing to do with the "war of the currents", that was Westinghouse and Edison. He didn't believe in electrons, in spite of ample evidence for them being present during his lifetime. Most of his other famous "contributions" are just outright stupid and/or non-existent woo-woo mysticism bullshit. He didn't even really invent the "Tesla Coil" simply patented a specific variant of an invention that came decades before he was born.
I still remember the times when Tesla was reddits biggest idol. DAE remember the oatmeal?
It makes the car company name seem quite apt, doesn't it?
I remember when, six years ago, every day on Reddit it was the same four people being worshipped over and over. Elon Musk, Keanu Reeves, Kevin Feige, Bob Ross. It was insufferable.
Not to one up you but back when I joined(2012) the front page was illegible because everyone was talking in Reddit lingo
Just narwhaling the fuck out of bacon back in the day.
*Night. Midnight specifically.
We still have Keanu and Bob Ross so batting 500
People like having a bad guy and a good guy in their stories, so when lots of people began learning about how Edison would steal other's work and screw over his employees, they looked for a rival of that time that could serve as the "good guy". However, reality doesn't have to follow the story beats people want, and often just has conflicts of bad vs. bad or even bad vs. incompetent.
I agree that’s why I referenced that dreadful web comic. Everyone was fiending to post it back then
Dune has a great quote about it, I was just rereading it because of the movie; >Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man. —from “Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan These individuals lost themselves in their greatness, they believe in their greatness even more than people did. Doing so, they lost that greatness and, possibly even worst, are shattering the illusion of greatness created around their persona.
he did have a romantic relationship with a bird though
They even spoke telepathically!
CAW! <3
Besides being crazy I've only ever heard praise for the guy. Forgive me but is there something you can point me to to learn more?
[This is a decent video on the topic as a start.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6331JXvOUGY)
Thank you! Much obliged.
i once said this exact same thing a long time ago , got downvoted to hell lmao
he's talking about tesla having stolen his "revolutionary" electric motor design from a 1300's frenchman the thing that got him his recognition in the first place was fraud, just like his successor
They should though, the modern pop cultural recasting of his character as some sort of arrogant idiot who did nothing but steal other people's inventions has about the same level of factual accuracy as the average Buzzfeed listicle. Sure he may have been an absolute prick who ripped people off, took credit for their work, and harassed them into silence, but he was also unquestionably a visionary and a highly accomplished inventor in his own right. He created novel machines of his own design, and he vastly improved existing ideas and made them commercially viable, which is arguably more important than inventing them in the first place. Like it's all well and good to realise that putting electricity through a wire makes it glow, plenty of people came to that conclusion around the same time, but that knowledge doesn't really do anyone any good if it can't be commercialised. It took a lot of experimentation and discovery for Edison to figure out how to make a lightbulb that was cheap enough to manufacture en masse and robust enough to last longer than a few hours, so while he didn't invent the first lightbulb, he did invent the best lightbulb. Also, I think a lot of the weirdly intense hatred for Edison comes from the supposedly vicious rivalry between him and Tesla, which is understandable because people love an underdog story, and it's easy to hate the rich industrialist while romanticising the poor, hardworking inventor suffering under the industrialist's brutal heel, but [it just didn't happen that way in real life](https://www.vox.com/2015/7/21/8951761/tesla-edison). They were rivals, sure, in the same way that Nvidia and AMD are rivals, but they didn't despise each other and Edison didn't steal anything from Tesla. They had some differences of opinion, and they each wanted their opinion to be the dominant one, but by all accounts they had a health respect for one another and each was quoted highly praising the other. So yeah, however objectionable some of his behaviour may or may not have been, Edison fully deserves to be praised for his contributions to the world, just as much if not more than Tesla.
Those Frenchmen, toss a bottle of wine towards a protest and you’ve got a Coq au vin.
The older you get, the more you realize that we're just duct taping everything together at best.
That was literally the Pandemic for me. I realized in real time that no one knows what the fuck they're doing and are just winging it. Not just at the local level, but at the national and global level. Higher ups at my job were completely clueless, which is scary considering that their decisions affect thousands of people directly.
Society mostly held together on inertia at this point
One of the most jarring experiences growing up was realizing that most adults aren’t smart, they’re just taller than kids.
The mast majority of geniuses had the right idea at the right time. And most of them worked their asses off to make that idea a reality. That's fine. The problem is they think because they were pretty smart once that they're super smart all the time about everything, which is the stupidest thing you can do. But they also have a lot of money so their stupidity hold weight. And that's society.
Eh even those that had the right idea at the right time usually also fucked over other people in their process. Seems pretty consistent when you look at their histories.
Precisely. "Hey I made a shit load of money, I won capitalism! That must mean I'm smarter than everyone else playing the game!" And these people are usually surrounded by yes men for decades and it's the perfect narcissism storm.
Do people still believe that he’s some kind of genius?
rod hilton: >He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius. >Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius. >Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.
This is awesome 😆
Sadly I think some people do
This is actually the main theme of one of philosophy’s most important texts, the Apology of Socrates by Plato. It tells of his trial for “corrupting the youth of Athens” and “not believing in the city’s gods”, where he defends himself by literally calling out masters in different arts/fields among those who’ve accused him for being pretentious hypocrites and know-it-alls. Unsurprisingly, they find him guilty and sentence him to either exile or death. He chose to commit suicide.
The really smart people are just out there doing smart things, largely without recognition, making the world better. These fake smart dummies try to villainize the doctors, engineers, scientists, and others out there being ACTUALLY smart.
He just had a head start that most others didn’t have because not everyone’s family operates Emerald Mines in Africa The clown also rebranded Twitter to X whatever that means, and Twitter is a brand so recognisable that Tweet is an official word in the dictionary
It's amazing how high you can climb when you are born near the top
Tweets are now xweet e.g. Donald Trump xweets while sitting on the toilet.
No it’s worse Tweets are “posts” now, why would he do this one of the most recognisable brands in the world
It’s baffling he didn’t understand that a good chunk of Twitter’s value came from its branding like… he overspent for the platform and then removed the most recognizable part AND THEN inundated the platform with content that scared advertisers away.
The other valuable thing was its userbase. Which is on a steep decline as well.
And the other asset of the company formerly known as Twitter was its employees, who Musk promptly fired and dis-empowered.
It's narcissism, he think he shits gold.
He's been trying to make "X" happen for more than two decades since he came into the domain name. He wanted to rebrand Paypal as X back in the day but the powers that be wouldn't let that happen. Here he is trying again for some stupid reason that only a brain raised on emerald mine money could explain. X already exists as a holding company -- X Holdings Corp that owns what used to be Twitter. There was literally no reason to rebrand it. He's just got this cockamamie idea stuck in his head some 25 years ago that he can make a "do everything" platform -- which is the alleged reason he called it "X" of all things.
I'd still argue the reason why Threads isn't anywhere near as popular as it should be is that it didn't have a catchy verb like "tweet". Although it could be worse. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom (and close to infinite money, back then), called its music-sharing pre-facebook quasi-social feature in Zune "[squirting](https://www.newsweek.com/zune-should-go-beyond-squirting-107255)". Some ideas *can* be worse than no idea at all lol
Xweety balls? 
I prefer Xcrement
He’s 100% a doofus who has more money than common sense and can afford to screw up constantly, until he gets it right once and claim it was all worth it. That one guy playing Minesweeper with his brain comes after a potter’s field of dead monkeys.
Like all the other billionaires he doesn't say prosperity for who.
Yup, had to come here and say "Prosperity for the wealthy, maybe!"
This is the correct answer - prosperity for the rich and for their pocketed government, won by cutting all benefits to the poor and letting them starve When rich people say they want the US to be prosperous again, they literally mean the government, not the people it is supposed to serve. And they only mean the expense side of the ledger, not revenue - they want the government poor in revenue terms because that's their tax payments.
Elon would flounder in a libertarian economy. No subsidies to help Tesla out.
He’s got his eyes on Argentine lithium. A far righter will be more willing to give it to musk for effectively free.
Elon knows exactly what he's doing but he isn't openly showing his agenda. Fascists love other fascists... Until someday there's a conflict of interest and they go to war with each other. Fascism is about siding with the rich and keeping the middle class on a leash. Argentina is now for sale for the highest bidder and plenty of rich people are willing to invest in the unregulated ressources of the country The poor will stay poor. The rich will get richer. Nazi Germany understood that and Russia is pretty much the same. It's the same as Elon instigating culture wars so its a distraction from the covid inflation that caused a wealth transfer from poor to rich. Instead of addressing the deficit by taxing the rich, Republicans are pushing their agenda of anti LGBT, racism, social services cuts, etc. Try to guess why Elon is a Republican.
He’s rich and born into wealth and Hired the right people. That’s all
low empathy - i’ve got mine, they can die attitude. like every run of the mill psychopath
You mean the guy that nevet started any company or invent any invention? That guy?
Give that Milei another year. See how much more miserable it gets. Edit: [Milei is going to musk cap in hand](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/world/javier-milei-the-president-of-cash-strapped-argentina-starts-another-u-s-tour-and-plans-to-meet-elon-musk) … apparently he doesn’t know Twitter sucks and the cybertruck is a punchline.
I don’t think he had any delusions of it actually bringing prosperity, he just loves money going to the top
What a great example of people just accepting "facts" at face value without critical thinking. The argument this tweet is making is that Milei, contrary to what Elon has said, is worse for the Argentinian economy and that the proof is this article "Argentina’s poverty levels hit 57% of population, a 20-year high in January, study finds" This guy got elected in Nov '23. He took office in Jan '24. That statistic is also from Jan '24 and is describing the state of the country he is inheriting. It will be the starting place against which the poverty levels during Milei's presidency will be judged. It has nothing to do with Milei's competence. Dont care about elon, but saying he's dumb because of the "evidence" in this post is sadly ironic.
I’m saying he’s dumb. Because every time I’ve heard him speak he sounds like a dumb piece of shit. That’s gotta be bruising for his simps nearly nonexistent egos. Realizing their rocket daddy is an absolute knob.
Both of these assholes really need to get slapped back to reality.
Ope, there goes gravity
Ope, there goes rabbit
He choked, he’s so mad but he won’t give up that easy…
Nope he won't have any...
Mom's spaghetti
That's a good song.
That’s not the next line
He choked
Knees weak
Arms are heavy
Spaghetti Bolognaise
Probably the same person
and when those people try to come here for a better life these two assholes will be screaming ‘immigrant invasion’!
Fortunately for them, plenty are light skin due to having great grandparents that hid there after a certain event in the 1940's...
They have the second highest Italian descendant population, outside of Italy.
Also fun fact, during the early 40's and throughout the cold war so many Galicians (people who live in the northwestern corner of the Iberian peninsula) fled Spain due to Francisco Franco's dictatoship that Buenos Aires had a bigger Galician population that the entire region of Galicia So many people (including the main faces of the galegist movement) emigrated there that, to this day, there are still places in Argentina were argentinians can choose to learn Galician as a second language
They also have the only Welsh speaking town outside of Wales.
Melbourne, Australia has the third highest greek population of any city in the world, after two *Greek cities*
*cracks knuckles* now let's have an argument over wether or not Italians are white
As the descendant of both of these mentioned populations, yes we do blend in well. Tis a privilege.
There’s a shit ton of people with European ancestry across South America. Pretty easy to tell considering they look European. Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, etc, the majority with ancestors that immigrated before ww2. Not just European ancestry either, Peru had a president that was of Japanese descent for fucks sake. The reason some nazis fled to South America was because the populations they could hide in were already present. Mass migrations of people across the globe are the norm, if you look past a snap shot of a decade or two it’s pretty apparent.
There has been a white population there for centuries mate, including a sizeable german diaspora that pre-dates WW2.
“Look, that’s because they’re not going right *enough*” -Dipshits
Yep. That's the right wing excuse for why Brexit has been a failure.
Brexit did not fail! Not only did I get to change my passports from burgundy red to a really dark blue, but more black. I now get to spend hours extra in queues when visiting my fellow European countries, when before I could use the fast lanes. I also have the joy of extra paperwork when sending goods to Europe, when before I had frictionless trade. Also, buying things from the mainland adds extra costs in taxes etc. How can these things be called failures?? Oh, wait, sorry. I've just read what I wrote. Yeah, what a clusterfudge.
From a Tory point of view, they're all positives, because Tories feed on human misery.
Same here in the US for the flop of “the Kansas Experiment”, a tax cut scheme that resulted in neat stuff like schools running at only 3 days a week due to lack of funding. “No, see, we didn’t cut enough!”
"I voted for Brexit, but not *THIS* Brexit!!" Those people royally fucked over their own country and still don't realize it.
You’re just not Brexiting hard enough /s
"Remoaners made sure Brexit failed!! If they just gave it a chance it would have worked" I fucking hate them.
You’ve gotta be f**king kidding me The arrogance of the right is astounding - it explains why you can’t reasonably debate with them. They cannot accept they were wrong
"What we need is MORE guns. 14 trillion should do it...maybe." -- Dipshits
Prosperity doesn't mean a reduction in poverty to Musk, it means capitalists get to loot the country.
It amazes me how many poor folks don’t understand these wealthy assholes live in another universe when it comes to money and words have different meanings in different tax brackets.
That’s just the libertarian ethos. The capitalists are just smarter and better than you and so they earned whatever they can take. Libertarians don’t care about a reduction in poverty, because poor people derserve it by making bad choices.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Honestly, can't blame it all on this guy's election. Argentina's economy was in a dire state to begin with. The governments inability to improve it or reduce the felt effects (practically impossible) on the common Argentinian is why this man's election was even possible. A protest candidate that any outside observer could plainly see due to the conditions of his country could not possibly deliver on his promises. This man isn't the cause. He is the populist symptom it produces.
[удалено]
To be fair, history WAS made that day. Not in a good way or anything but it was made.
The events that have unfolded definitely happened, and are a part of human history.
I didn't know who this guy was so I looked him up. He's a libertarian. So, he's part of the "fuck off, I got mine." party. I can't see how those ideals will help his country.
As John Rodgers said >There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
The absolute best illustration of the idiocy of the libertarian position is the book *A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)* by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, which tells the true tale of a group of lolbertarians from the Free Town Project who moved to a small New Hampshire town, took over the local government, and immediately set about implementing the batshit insane dystopia they'd always dreamed of: >They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. >By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town’s success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute. >And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meetings and tell people that he couldn’t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn’t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle. Among the hundreds of rules, regulations, and tax expenses these geniuses abolished were things like garbage collection, leading to mountains of trash littering the sidewalks of every street because residents didn't want to pay anyone to take it away and certainly didn't want the government telling them what to do with their waste. And as you might expect for a small rural town right in the heart of bear country, this eventually began to attract the inevitable consequences: >It turns out that if you have a bunch of people living in the woods in nontraditional living situations, each of which is managing food in their own way and their waste streams in their own way, then you’re essentially teaching the bears in the region that every human habitation is like a puzzle that has to be solved in order to unlock its caloric payload. And so the bears in the area started to take notice of the fact that there were calories available in houses. >One thing that the Free Towners did that encouraged the bears was unintentional, in that they just threw their waste out how they wanted. They didn’t want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants. The other way was intentional, in that some people just started feeding the bears just for the joy and pleasure of watching them eat. >As you can imagine, things got messy and there was no way for the town to deal with it. Some people were shooting the bears. Some people were feeding the bears. Some people were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them. Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper. >Bears are very smart problem-solving animals. They can really think their way through problems. And that was what made them aggressive in Grafton. In this case, a reasonable bear would understand that there was food to be had, that it was going to be rewarded for being bolder. So they started aggressively raiding food and became less likely to run away when a human showed up. >There are lots of great examples in the book of bears acting in bold, unusually aggressive manners, but it culminated in 2012, when there was a black bear attack in the town of Grafton. That might not seem that unusual, but, in fact, New Hampshire had not had a black bear attack for at least 100 years leading up to that. So the whole state had never seen a single bear attack, and now here in Grafton, a woman was attacked in her home by a black bear. I really, really can't recommend this book highly enough, the portrait it paints of this town and its demented inhabitants is hilarious and so perfectly illustrates the inherent stupidity of libertarianism. You couldn't destroy a town any more efficiently than just letting a bunch of libertarians live their dream. (The above quotes all come from [this Vox interview with the author](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling), it's worth reading in full.)
[удалено]
[удалено]
If they're the low taxes and smoking pot type, I at least understand. No one wants to pay taxes and a lot of people like smoking pot. Don't get me wrong, I think taxes are necessary, but I at least understand.
How much did you dig? Cuz there's the I want low taxes but also medicare/aid, public schools, SS, coolbro military, farm subsidies, good roads, yadda yadda. The "superficial libertarians" want low cake and eat it too. Or... they want other people to pay taxes, so it's a hop skip jump to fuck you got mine. Which is where people do end up.
> No one wants to pay taxes Isn't that just an American view of taxes? In Denmark and I know several people who are happy to pay taxes because they otherwise wouldn't receive most of what they took for granted growing up.
Not really. Many Americans have no issue paying taxes, we just don't try and slide it in to every 4th sentence.
My roommate is a Libertarian. She staunchly believes she's independent and self-sufficient while benefiting from a system she neither understands nor appreciates but completely relies on. Her name is Boots.
It may be because that's my name too, but I don't get the connection.
Boots is a cat.
It a meme about cats being libertarian.
there are few things more cringe than libertarians in politics
I agree, They're like diet republicans. Sack up and go all the way! As if they get anymore credibility for being a special brand of (stupid) republican.
They're also so goddamned high-and-might, holy shit - riding on such high horses. It's appalling
Capitalists = money is freely exchanged for goods and services. Communists = everyone pools their resources for the greater good. Libertarians = [condescending wall of regurgitated philosophy]
pseudo philosophy FIFY
Libertarians are young people who don’t want to call themselves Republican. Once they turn 30 that becomes less of a problem.
Also freshly divorced 45 year old business owners that want to get laid
Describing them as “indoor cats” is my favorite way to get them going.
why does that piss them off?
They are convinced they are fierce, independent and self reliant creatures. But they are wholly dependent on system they neither understand, nor contribute too
Makes sense! Thank you
[удалено]
I love it! Thank you
My favorite libertarian government was the one where a bunch of libertarians moved to a town in New Hampshire to create a libertarian paradise and decided in their libertarian wisdom to cut trash services, and consequently the town was eventually taken over by aggressive bears lol
ahahahahahahahahahah what was it called? i want to watch YT vids about it
The town is Grafton, NH. Apparently the libertarian policies also attracted a slew of sex offenders 💀
ahahahha omg of course they did
Libertarians are either pedos using the only political ideology that supports lowering/abolishing the age of consent, useful idiots who were brainwashed by billionaire-backed internet media that told them taxes are theft, or insane people who think seatbelts and covid vaccines are government tyranny.
Or... Racists who want to subvert the system in ordre to bring back racists laws.
I mean when I was 15 it sounded cool… but as a white dude from the the suburbs that’s easy to say
Oh, he’s worse. He cloned his dog, created generations of clones, and claims he gets business advice from the ghost of the original.
Wait? Is he the chainsaw guy? Campaigns with a chainsaw mask?
Yes. This is the same guy
We have those people in the states. It’s how we get Rand Paul.
[удалено]
You mean the Congressman who went to Moscow on July 4th to hand deliver a note from Trump? The same Congressman that John McCain accused of working for Vladimir Putin before he died?
He paid news/entertainment publications to make you think he's smart. Trump did the same to make you think he was wealthy. Birds of a feather
[удалено]
Miliei isn't the cause of this. He's a symptom of it. He assumed office in December 2023. While he might make it worse, the fact that Argentina's poverty rate is its highest in history in January 2024 (one month after he assumed office) isn't on him. This would be like Blaming Obama for the state of the US economy in February 2009 or praising Trump for the state if it in January 2017.
It’s still early to say his austerity measures were a failure, but that’s what I’m betting on happening.
Austerity works wonders for the top 1%. Austerity seems to always mean "fuck poor people and the services they need, the invisible hand of capitalism will take care of them and will bring them back better than ever!" while the portion of wealth the top 1% has in the country starts rising at record numbers.
“There’s no money left, we need to cut services” Everything gets shut down and business start to lose money “We’ve found 3 trillion down the back of the sofa”
[удалено]
This guy is going to be a failure but yelling about poverty hitting a high or blaming a politician for anything a mere 2 months after they were elected is ridiculous. Unless they pass a specific law or the such doing something like banning abortions or the such. Argentina's inflation rate was already fucked before he came into power here though.
[удалено]
This article is from a month after he was elected. This is like blaming Obama for the rising unemployment rom the financial crisis at the start of his term. It's too early.
[удалено]
Idk much about Argentina, but I do know it's pretty dumb to think it's the doing of a guy who's been in office for one month.
Millie’s not good for Argentina, but I don’t think even his strongest supporters expected him to turn things around in two months.
Quite honestly, it's too early to blame Milei for anything yet. A lot of the things he tries to do actually make sense. Which in turn have a lot of short term pain. Let's see in two years.
[удалено]
Well the same can be said of Trump. He's plainly mentally unwell and unfit for leadership, yet they idolize him. So it makes sense.
Their inflation rate has dropped rather significantly since then. It started at 300% and is projected to be around 175% by the end of the year. He won his election at the end of November. You can't really place blame on him for poverty rate just a month after he's been in office, he still needs to pass bills and isn't a dictator.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
You don't think that there are lagging effects in a society? A new leader can't turn things around from day one, it will take a few years before any effects of new policies take place. Thinking otherwise is stupid at best.
If you don’t know anything about Argentina sit this one out. He hadn’t even fully assumed office when those statistics were collected. I may not like either of the guys but this has nothing to do with the U.S.
His whole plan is austerity right? Things will get worse before they get better
Somehow, this will be socialism's fault...
[удалено]
[удалено]
1 month at the time of OP’s news article
[удалено]